Thursday, June 26, 2014

If you want to know exactly when Homeplus or E-mart is going to be closed, a very simple Naver search will tell you precisely, and you really don't even need to know Korean to do it. Seriously, it is SUPER simple, and it's what all the Koreans I know do. Don't bother trying to count which Sunday it is today, or if today's a special holiday, or if your local branch closes mid-week, or guess what time it opens or closes. Ain't nobody got time for that.

Here are some screenshots I took on my phone. Notice the red text for holidays, and you'll also see that it's not always Sundays that the place is closed. You know the days of the week in Korean, right?

월(Mon) 화(Tues) 수(Wed) 목(Thurs) 금(Fri) 토(Sat) 일(Sun)

A search for the Paju-Munsan branch of Homeplus shows it's closed June 9 (Mon) and June 24 (Tues)

A search for the Daegu branch of Homeplus shows it's closed June 8 (Sun) and June 22 (Sun)

A search for the Yeoksam branch of E-Mart shows it's closed June 8 (Sun) and June 22 (Sun)

I see a lot of people asking about this on Waygook and Reddit and Facebook, so hopefully this post has helped you. Remember after you've searched it once and got it working, be sure to bookmark the results page. Then you will NEVER AGAIN have to freak out about whether or not you can buy your adorable Tesco Penguin Frosted Flakes today.

Tuesday, June 10, 2014

To save friends' KakaoTalk profile pictures, you don't have to rely on taking screen-shots. There are actually several apps that can save the photo files to your phone's storage, and they all work basically the same way.

How It Works

When you view your friends' profile photos, the
file gets saved in Kakao's cache folder. You could, in theory, go
snooping through these folders with a File Explorer, but it would be
annoying because they are stored in weird folder hierarchies with weird
file names. ProfileAlbum consolidates them in a clean list, and let's you check-box the ones you want to save to a folder that your Gallery app can
see.

So here is the key thing to note: YOU MUST
VIEW THE PHOTO AS BIG AS YOU CAN FIRST. The apps don't "download"
anything; they just grab what is in your cache already. Thus, you should
be sure to view the person's full-size photo FIRST, THEN run the app to save it. Got it? So you can't use it to snoop on people you blocked (unless you unblock them real quick, view their profile photo fully, then block them again before they notice Bob's your uncle)

Note that for best results in KakaoStory, don't just view the picture in its "story"-- click it to get it individual and full-screen, so that the
version with the largest possible resolution will be downloaded to your
cache.

Usefulness

I find this a great way to set Android Contact photos that are then utilized across all my Google-sync services. Note that there areapps that will better automate this process, but I feel uneasy giving apps access to my Contacts.